David R. Millen

Director of a User Interface Design Group responsible for the user interface design of advanced business communications systems and exploratory prototype development of advanced speech applications and pen-based interfaces, Millen has also...

Mike Saranga

Designer and implementer of IBM's Program Fetch and co-developer of IBM's relational databases, Saranga brought 36 years of extensive experience in system architecture, product development, and executive management. He spent 30 years...

Donald Watts Davies

Co-inventor of packet switching and originator of the term, Davies was a British computer scientist who developed this foundational concept alongside Paul Baran in the US. Davies was born in Treorchy, Wales, in...

David Karp

Founder of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr, Karp is an American web developer and entrepreneur. According to Forbes, his net worth exceeded $200 million, and Tumblr was valued at $800 million. On...

Annie Easley

A significant contributor to the early development of NASA's rocket technologies, Easley spent decades as a NASA engineer whose work in programming, energy-conversion, and shuttle launches helped address the agency's need for...

Charles Simonyi

Overseer of Microsoft's flagship Office applications Word and Excel, Simonyi also directed development of Excel's predecessor Multiplan. In 1981, he applied directly to Bill Gates for a job at Microsoft. With Multiplan,...

Peter Kogge

Designer of the Space Shuttle I/O processor — one of the first multithreaded computers and the first to fly in space — Kogge is a computer engineer and 1993 IBM Fellow who...

Ben Forta

Author of numerous technical books on ColdFusion, SQL, and Regular Expressions, Forta has also served as Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems, particularly ColdFusion and Flex, and has been the owner of...

Randy Cartwright

Creator of Animation Timer, a stopwatch application for Apple iPhones, Cartwright is a veteran Disney animator and filmmaker. Born in Virginia, Cartwright graduated from UCLA in 1974, where he made his student animated...

Peter John Landin

One of the first to realize that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, Landin made contributions essential to the development of both functional programming and denotational semantics....

Donald Michael Ludlow

Principal designer and developer of the Input-Output Supervisor (IOS) component of OS/360, Ludlow made significant contributions to IBM's landmark operating system. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Ludlow grew up in Melvindale. He earned a...

Stephen Wolfram

Chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine, Wolfram is a British scientist whose parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, to England in 1933. He was...

Kang-Won Lee

Collaborator on wireless networks, mobile computing, network management, and policy technologies research, Lee has been a Research Staff Member at IBM since 2000 and led the Wireless Networking Group at Watson from...

Louis Pouzin

Invented the datagram and designed the first packet communications network, CYCLADES, Pouzin also created the first forms of command-line interface. His work was broadly used by Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, and many...

William (Bill) Yeager

Inventor of the multi-protocol router and network operating system, Yeager is best known for creating a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night," multiple-protocol router in 1981, during his 20-year tenure at Stanford's Knowledge...

Wietse Zweitze Venema

Writer of the Postfix email system and TCP Wrapper, Venema is a Dutch programmer and physicist recognized as an authority on Internet security. Postfix is a free and open-source mail transfer agent...

Friedrich Ludwig Bauer

First to propose the widely used stack method of expression evaluation, Bauer patented the pushdown stack in 1957, a contribution that proved foundational to modern computing. He contributed to the definition of...

Frederick Jelinek

Pioneer of speech recognition, Jelinek was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing, well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire a linguist, the...

Butler W. Lampson

Developer of the Berkeley Timesharing System for Scientific Data Systems' SDS 940 computer, Lampson was part of Project GENIE at UC Berkeley during the 1960s, where he and Peter Deutsch created that...

Joseph Weizenbaum

Creator of ELIZA, the pioneering natural language processing program that prompted his growing skepticism about artificial intelligence, Weizenbaum died March 5, 2008 in Berlin. He was 85. Joseph Weizenbaum was born on January...